Release PRs to staging and production were not generated

[jobara]

Prerequisites

• [X] I've searched for existing issues

Describe the bug

Upon cutting the 1.2.4 release, the sync release GitHub Actions did not trigger and no PRs were generated. I tried to run the "Sync release to staging" action manually but got an error that the "owner" was not defined. There is also a warning that tretuna/sync-branches@v1 is still configured to run on Node v12 but that the action was being forced to run in Node v16.

see:

• https://github.com/accessibility-exchange/platform/actions/runs/7090800347
• https://github.com/accessibility-exchange/platform/actions/runs/7090804237

Expected behavior

Upon a release being generated PRs should automatically be made from the new tag against Staging and Production.

Additional context

This feature was added in #2019

[jobara]

tretuna/sync-branches is not seeing much active maintenance at the moment. However, there is a newer release that should be used tretuna/sync-branches@1.4.0 to get past the "owner" error mentioned above. However, there is still the deprecation warning for using Node 12. I'm also now running into https://github.com/TreTuna/sync-branches/issues/75 in my local tests so am still not able to run it. There is another issue too with having workflows that are triggered by other automated processes. The solution there is to use a Personal Access Token or Deploy key. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69063452/github-actions-on-release-created-workflow-trigger-not-working

[jobara]

Another option is to use GitHub CLI instead of a 3rd party action.

see: https://stackoverflow.com/a/73340290

[jobara]

To further the complication it isn't possible to create PRs from Tags.

See: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/23870

[jobara]

To make this fully automated we'd need to also create a branch from the Tag. At the moment there aren't any GitHub CLI commands for performing branch operations. The existing GitHub Actions are few and appear to be out of date or little used. At this point I think it's safer to just manually perform the merge syncing and we can revisit this in the future. For now we should remove the syncing actions as they are not functional.

[jobara]

While investigating this issue, I worked on test implementation at https://github.com/jobara/test-release-sync-actions

[jobara]

New issue to implement the behaviour is filed at #2071